What is dark, illumine.

SD First Draft 11

Continuing the first drafts of Splintered Demons. To learn more about this book or view the table of contents for these first drafts posts, visit the novel page here.

Moira hesitated, afraid to give voice to the question that had wracked her since the first moment that Zau/Heraxo had spoken to her as a hybrid entity, for fear that to look too closely at the question would bring certainty that Zau was permanently and irretrievably gone. But now she had begun to give voice to the question she could not allow her fear to silence her.

“You are examining the deep structure of Zau/Heraxo’s memory.”

“We have been mapping the atomic structures of the memory banks to identify latent data which might be of use in our efforts to explore the Spire.”

“Right, so as you are mapping that information, is there any way that you can…” Moira paused, searching for the words to express her desire. Anomaly shimmered in the air beside Dyson as he looked at her quizzically. Finally, Moira said, “Can you isolate the different aspects of personalities in the cognition core? Work out which are from Zau and which are Heraxo so we could extract Zau from the hybrid?”

Anomaly pulsed, emitting a vague stuttering noise as it contemplated Moira’s request. As a matter of pure physical examination, it ought to be possible to identify which data within the personality matrix were more recent, but the extraction of that information could prove troublesome given the complexities of human/syntellect intelligence and the length of time which had passed since Zau had been introduced to the Heraxo cognition core. Ultimately it was a puzzle which might be unsolvable and the act of extracting any singular personality from the Zau/Heraxo conglomerate might result in a cascade failure of the entire personality matrix but that was a risk which Anomaly was willing to take for the sake of advancing its own knowledge of human and syntellect psychology.

“Maybe,” Anomaly said.

Dyson shot the hovering shimmer a narrow glare, then looked back to Moira. “I understand that you don’t trust me yet, but do you actually trust this… thing to meddle with Zau/Heraxo’s mind?”

“I don’t trust any of you, but if we’re going to be trapped together we might as well do our best to get along. Zau/Heraxo has already allowed Anomaly to study their physical structure, so I might as well put that trust to my own purposes.”

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“So that cage is the only neural scanner onboard?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, 💩,” Dyson said. He finished his fruit bar and stood to drop the wrapper into the recompiler hopper. “I don’t suppose we trust the recompiler to build us one?”

“You’ve seen what it can do with food. That’s easy compared to a neural scanner. Besides, I don’t have a set of schematics in my mesh, do you?”

Continuing the first drafts of Splintered Demons. To learn more about this book or view the table of contents for these first drafts posts, visit the novel page here.